Programming Android with Kotlin

Chapter 11. Performance Considerations with Android Profiling Tools

Using proficient concurrency in Android leads to better performance in your application. This is why we have made Kotlin concurrency in Android the primary focus of this book. In order to provide a solution for performance bottlenecks, you have to be able to spot them in the first place. Have no worry: this chapter looks at popular Android tooling commonly used to check for potential problems in performance.

Out in the wild, Android faces real-life challenges that affect performance and battery life. For example, not everyone has unlimited data in their mobile plans, or reliable connectivity. The reality is that Android apps must compete with one another for limited resources. Performance should be a serious consideration for any Android application. Android development doesn’t stop at creating an app. Effective development also ensures a smooth and seamless user experience. Even if you have a deep understanding of Android development, your application may have issues such as:

• Decrease in performance

• Slow startup/slow response to user interactions

• Battery drain

• Wasteful use of resources, and clogged memory

• UI bugs that don’t force a crash or generate an exception, but nevertheless affect user experience

This list of sudden, strange behaviors in an app is by no means exhaustive. As previous chapters showed, managing multithreading can become complex when there are also interacting Android components ...